(VIN) A Facebook rant about Muslims by an employee of a Walmart store in Hamburg has prompted the retail giant to fire the man.The derogatory posting on Friday morning was brought to the attention of Wal-Mart Stores executives by a member of the local Muslim community and by a national Muslim advocacy organization.The assistant manager at the Walmart on Southwestern Boulevard in Hamburg posted a photograph from behind of two Muslim women dressed in full cover and the written comments: “Halloween came early this year … do they really have to … dress like that … you’re in my country … get that … off!!!!!.”The employee was identified as Terry Earsing by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a national civil liberties organization that advocates on behalf of Muslims and had urged “appropriate disciplinary action” in the matter.A Wal-Mart spokeswoman said Wednesday that the employee was fired.“As soon as we became aware, we began looking into this and as a result, this associate is no longer with the company,” said Kayla Whaling. “We set high expectations for our associates, and this associate clearly failed to meet these expectations at every level.”Whaling said Wal-Mart learned of the posting Friday.Earsing apologized for the comments in a telephone interview.“I’m truly, honestly sorry about the whole thing. I just apologize. I don’t know what else I can say,” he said.Earsing said the incident started out as a joke that went awry.The board president of CAIR’s New York chapter praised the retailer for acting swiftly according to its policies.“We absolutely commend them for doing the right thing,” said Ryan Mahoney. “I wish this person didn’t take this course of action and force this outcome.”CAIR expressed concern because the organization thought that the photograph was taken while the assistant manager was at his workplace and not on his own personal time.“Because he did it at his job, it’s not about personal expression, it’s about Wal-Mart’s policy toward hate speech,” said Mahoney.Earsing said a friend of his sent the picture to him, and he added his comments to the picture in a Facebook posting.He said he was at home at the time he made the post.“I didn’t do it from work,” he said.–

Hot Air (Britain’s spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world’s phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA).

The sheer scale of the agency’s ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate.

One key innovation has been GCHQ’s ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months.

GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects.

This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user’s access to websites – all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets.)

the program disregarded P2P downloads, even though one might presume that this would be a potential method to use for illicit communication over the open-source Internet.

The long time official faceboook policy has long been to attack the victims who want to talk about the hate they deal with. This is nothing new. facebook also threw the Jewish Internet Defense Force’s permanent facebook account off the network, so it is almost impossible to organize against the hate. This is the long term policy of a network run by liberal feminist Jews and this is the general attitude that liberal feminist Jews have towards other Jews.

Following Palestinian Media Watch’s bulletin exposing the PA TV broadcast of a girl reciting a poem referring to (Carl)Jews as “enemies of Allah, descendants of pigs,” Facebook, like YouTube, decided to remove PMW’s post.

Facebook:“We removed the following content you posted or were the admin of because it violates Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.”

Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities stipulates that “you will not post content that is hate speech” or “incites violence.” While Facebook is preventing PMW’s exposure of the PA’s hate speech, Facebook’s policy has not been applied to the explicit terror promotion and terror glorification by Fatah on Facebook, which PMW has documented, all of which were posted by Fatah’s Facebook page administrator:

Anas Ismail, 29, of Salfit, near Nablus, was found guilty of “libel and slander.” Ismail is the second Palestinian to be imprisoned for Facebook activities in the past few days. He said he was accused of clicking “Like” on a status that called for sacking former PA Communications minister Mashhour Abu Daka. Careful with that button!

Former JPost reporter Khaled Abu Toameh’s Facebook account has been blocked, apparently because of articles he posted about corruption in the ‘Palestinian Authority’ (Hat Tip: Lahav Harkov via Twitter).

The Commentator has learned that following complaints from the Palestinian Authority and Jordanian security authorities about his articles dealing with corruption, Facebook had taken the steps necessary to effectively censor his work.

In speaking this morning to us, Abu Toameh noted, “All I have done recently is share some articles which have been in the Jordanian press (in Arabic) about corruption. I am for transparency, against corruption, and yet they ban my account and continue to allow the leader of Hamas to have an account. I am not in favour of terrorism like he is. This is an attempt to silence me. To do this to a journalist is very bad.”

Facebook sent the following pro-forma e-mail to Abu Toameh yesterday evening: “You posted an item that violated our Terms of Use, and this item has been removed. Among other things, content that is hateful, threatening, or obscene is not allowed, nor is content that attacks an individual or group. Continued misuse of Facebook’s features could result in your account being disabled.”

Toameh also told The Commentator that over the past few days, he has been the subject of much online abuse, as well as threats and an apparently concerted smear campaign against him.This recently culminated in the posting of an article on the ‘Sabbah.biz’ website, accusing Toameh of being an ‘Israeli Hasbara agent’ and showing a picture of him with the Star of David on his head. The website is run by ‘Haitham Sabbah’, who is based out of Tulkarm in the West Bank.

A petition is already being circulated calling for Facebook to restore the account, stating: “It is not the role of Facebook to act as a censor of the truth so please sign to put pressure on to reopen this account if there is to be a chance for peace, stifling the truth and hiding the reality of corruption and incitement of hatred instead of promoting a peaceful solution is not the way.”

(nytimes) Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Facebook is making changes to its privacy settings.First, it is improving some privacy protections. The company is adding a new top-level control, called Privacy Shortcuts, that will allow people to quickly change who can see their “stuff” (as Facebook calls it) and who can contact them through the Web site. The shortcut will also feature a one-button link to block someone on Facebook.In a phone interview, Sam Lessin, Facebook’s director of product, said these shortcuts will always be visible to people on Facebook as they navigate the site. He added that highlighting the ability to block someone is an increasingly useful feature.“There are a billion users and blocking is the ultimate way of saying I don’t want to interact with this person,” Mr. Lessin said. “We think blocking is really positive.”The company is also introducing a higher level of control on the site’s Activity Log, a feature that allows people to hide or remove things that appear on their Facebook timeline. People will now be able to quickly view and control comments, photos and posts that have been tagged by others.But when Facebook giveth, Facebook taketh away.The company is eliminating the ability for people to hide themselves on Facebook’s search, a control, that until now, has existed in the privacy settings on the company’s Web site.Mr. Lessin said the ability to hide from the site’s search would be “retired” as only ”a single-digit percentage of users” actually hide themselves from Facebook search. But keep in mind that Facebook has a billion people on the site; a single-digit percentage of users could mean tens of millions of people.But we should have seen this coming. During the TechCrunch Disrupt conference earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, talked about the company’s potential moves into search, highlighting how people use the feature.“Search is interesting. We do on the order of 1 billion queries a day and we’re basically not even trying,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “Today with search the vast majority of it is people trying to find people.”Now you won’t have a choice but to be featured in search. At least you can easily block someone who finds you.

And they called me a cyberstalker? I’m not angry with facebook. I’m angry that people are angry